Actually, the technology is available for decades : it's thermonuclear weapons.After a full scale thermonuclear world war, Earth will be colder than Artic down to Africa. Nevertheless, food production will be close to 0 and mankind will be replaced by beetles which are quite resistant to radiations and scarce food.

A Canadian startup is testing a system that sucks carbon dioxide from the air and converts it into fuel for cars and other vehicles.

Carbon Engineering Ltd.’s technique combines several common manufacturing processes and will eventually be able to produce fuel for about $4 a gallon, according to David Keith, a Harvard University professor and co-founder of the company.

With oil prices climbing and U.S. gasoline following suit, that’s a level that could make this alternative fuel competitive. Many companies have developed ways to make fuel from plants, trees, sugarcane waste and other substances instead of petroleum, but the challenge has always been the cost. Carbon Engineering’s technique was developed specifically to address this.

“This isn’t some new clever piece of science or weird chemical we synthesized in some fancy lab,” Keith said in an interview. “The key thing that the company’s done from the beginning is focus on doing this in a way that is industrially scalable.”

The “direct air capture” process starts with common industrial cooling systems and a solution that draws carbon from the air, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Joule. The carbon is combined with hydrogen to make motor fuel, through a technique used at pulp mills. The most expensive part is the electricity used to extract hydrogen from water.

Actually, the technology is available for decades : it's thermonuclear weapons.After a full scale thermonuclear world war, Earth will be colder than Artic down to Africa. Nevertheless, food production will be close to 0 and mankind will be replaced by beetles which are quite resistant to radiations and scarce food.

Cog wrote:Climate change is irrelevant compared to running out of oil. At least as far as humanity's future goes.

In the intermediate term, yes. But hopefully mankind's future runs longer than the next century or even three.

The good news is that despite the denial of the Cassandras, technology does change significantly over time, so the future of, say, 50 years from now can look VERY different re the amount of fossil fuels people need to burn to survive and even prosper, compared to today.

Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.

A Canadian startup is testing a system that sucks carbon dioxide from the air and converts it into fuel for cars and other vehicles.

Carbon Engineering Ltd.’s technique combines several common manufacturing processes and will eventually be able to produce fuel for about $4 a gallon, according to David Keith, a Harvard University professor and co-founder of the company.

With oil prices climbing and U.S. gasoline following suit, that’s a level that could make this alternative fuel competitive. Many companies have developed ways to make fuel from plants, trees, sugarcane waste and other substances instead of petroleum, but the challenge has always been the cost. Carbon Engineering’s technique was developed specifically to address this.

“This isn’t some new clever piece of science or weird chemical we synthesized in some fancy lab,” Keith said in an interview. “The key thing that the company’s done from the beginning is focus on doing this in a way that is industrially scalable.”

The “direct air capture” process starts with common industrial cooling systems and a solution that draws carbon from the air, according to a paper published Thursday in the journal Joule. The carbon is combined with hydrogen to make motor fuel, through a technique used at pulp mills. The most expensive part is the electricity used to extract hydrogen from water.

I saw that on Ars Technia or some such site. That's VERY exciting IF the cost is realistic and IF it can truly be scaled.

If in 50 years we can be 80%+ using clean green tech and for the other 20% of transpo, construction, production, etc. we can be using tech that recycles a huge proportion of the CO2 produces by man made processes (like factories) AND the cost isn't outrageous, that's pretty huge.

The overall figure I saw was that this process cut the cost by a little over 6 fold.

...

Now of course, we have to wait several years or so to see if this can scale beyond the lab and still be practical. (Because claims of companies re such processes are far different than them actually PROVING such claims are valid in a commercially viable setting).

Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.

Can Technology Reverse Climate Change?By The Editors of IEEE SpectrumDo you believe that climate change is a vast left-wing conspiracy that does little more than create jobs for scientists while crippling businesses with pointless regulation? Or, quite the contrary, are you convinced that climate change is the biggest crisis confronting the planet, uniquely capable of wreaking havoc on a scale not seen in recorded history?

Many of you are probably in one camp or the other. No doubt some of you will tell us how disappointed/angry/outraged you are that we (a) gave credence to this nonsense or (b) failed to convey the true urgency of the situation. We welcome your thoughts.

In crafting this issue, we steered clear of attempting to change hearts and minds. Your views on climate change aren’t likely to be altered by a magazine article, or even two dozen magazine articles. Rather, this issue grew out of a few simple observations. One is that massive R&D programs are now under way all over the world to develop and deploy the technologies and infrastructures that will help reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Governments, corporations, philanthropies, and universities are spending billions of dollars on these efforts. Is this money being spent wisely?

That question brings us to the next observation: The magnitude of the challenge is eye-poppingly huge. In 2009, representatives of industrialized nations met in Copenhagen and agreed on the advisability of preventing global average temperatures from rising more than 2 °C above their preindustrial levels. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1) declared that doing so would require cutting greenhouse gas emissions 40 to 70 percent from 2010 levels by midcentury. These targets then guided the Paris Agreement (2), in 2015.

Even before Paris, Bill Gates had declared his belief that only a series of “energy miracles” could make meaningful progress in reducing greenhouse gases (3).

That got us thinking: What might those “miracles” be? If they were going to enable substantial cuts within a couple of decades, they would have to be in laboratories now.

So we started looking around for these miracles. We focused on three of the largest greenhouse-gas-emitting categories: electricity, transportation, and food and agriculture. We considered dozens of promising projects and programs. Eventually we settled on the 10 projects described in this issue (and two others covered on our website).

We picked most of these projects because they seemed to hold unusual promise relative to the attention they were getting. And we threw in a couple for, well, the opposite reason. Our reporters went to see these activities firsthand, fanning out to sites in Japan; Iceland; Hungary; Germany; the Netherlands; Columbus, N.M.; Schenectady, N.Y.; LaPorte, Texas; Cambridge, Mass.; and Bellevue, Wash. They trooped up and down vertical farms. They flew in electric airplanes. They viewed entirely new microorganisms—genetically engineered with the help of robots—growing in shiny steel fermentation chambers. An algae-growing tank burbled quietly in our mid-Manhattan offices, sprouting the makings for a green-breakfast taste test.

After six months, we had soaked up some of the best thinking on the use of tech to cut carbon emissions. But what did it all suggest collectively? Could these projects, and others like them, make a real difference? We put these questions to our columnist Vaclav Smil, a renowned energy economist, who responded with an essay (4). Without stealing Smil’s thunder, let’s just say that they don’t call them “miracles” for nothing.

KJ as a computer development expert I am sure you are familiar with mathematics as a subject, specifically the case of bifurcated hysteresis.

Climate and weather systems demonstrate that they follow a bifurcated hysteresis flow model when you are putting the numbers in. For those who were not well versed in mathematics you can think of bifurcation being a condition where two graph lines move in parallel like the rails of a train track. When one curves left the second matches its curve and so on. The hysteresis part of the statement means that climate or weather patterns will stay on one track for a long distance worth of conditions. When a changing condition puts force on the system to drive it toward the parallel track it resists for a long time, then suddenly jumps 90 degrees over onto the other track at the same set of conditions.

Once the system has hopped from one track to the other it will stay on that track going back and forth just like before until a considerable perturbation causes it to jump back to the first track. You can see this behavior for yourself if you look at the major glaciation climate record. Conditions pass the perturbation threshold and suddenly ice sheets start growing and expanding away from both geographic poles even though conditions from year to year are nearly identical. The tiny change that caused the climate to jump from a minor glaciation condition like we have today to a major glaciation condition where the ice sheets were a couple kilometers thick where I am currently sitting 20,000 ybp is indistinct in the geological record. For weather you can map the same thing in clouds that are precipitating or not with nearly indistinguishable conditions. A cloud formation will go from wet mist to rapid precipitation almost instantly over a wide geographic area as some crucial threshold is crossed, then just as suddenly cease when conditions shift back far enough.

The thing most people seem to have a hard time with is the knowledge that the perturbation once it sets of the track jump requires an opposite perturbation of at least the same order of magnitude to cause the climate or weather to jump back to the first track. If this were not so then the rain cloud would suddenly downpour for a few seconds or minutes and then relieved of a few percent of its stored moisture it would stop raining. This however is not what happens, once the rain starts falling the cloud doesn't just give up 1% or 5% of its moisture, it loses more like 40% and sometimes as much as 60% before the perturbation in the other direction is strong enough to halt the precipitation. In the same vein if you look at the climate record during the major glaciation of the most recent cycle you can see period on a 21,000 and 44,000 cycle and 100,000 year cycle plus others that all interacted in such ways that global temperatures actually fluctuated significantly, without ever quite breaking through into a minor glaciation cycle. Then enough of the cycles lined up close enough together after about 105,000 years of major glaciation to break through the perturbation threshold and dump us into the current minor glaciation track.

Point being, if humans manage to perturb the climate enough to hop us over to the next parallel track, the one where the northern hemisphere is nearly ice free while the Antarctic glaciation is reduced about 30% from where it stands today, the counter perturbation to put us back into the current minor glaciation is not an easy fix. think of it like this, if we hop tracks at 450 ppmv CO2 simply returning to 425 ppmv will not drop us back into minor glaciation climate track. The fact of the matter is the northern hemisphere stayed almost ice free all the way down to around 315 ppmv when the Miocene transitioned into the Pliocene and suddenly ice started appearing in the Northern Hemisphere on the 100,000 year cycle. Even then the ice was mostly seasonal for another few million years until CO2 fell low enough to cause the transition into the Pleistocene at which point ice became permanent glacial formations in northern Greenland that would from time to time spread out in a major glaciation to cover most land north of 41 degrees latitude where moisture was adequate.

IOW if we manage to flip the climate to the next track warmer it will take an extremely large reduction in solar energy input or greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere to perturb us back. Even worse, if you push that hard a simple miscalculation might cause us to skip the track we are on now and jump two tracks to the major glaciation status.

Can technology reverse climate change? With enough energy, time and effort you can change the climate. However if we have already survived the climate jumping from the minor glaciation track to the minor southern hemisphere semi tropical northern hemisphere track would any of the surviving people actually have the energy, time and extra effort to risk perturbing the earth back to say 1980 conditions? If you are a survivor after the transition you are going to be very busy the first few years/decades just surviving and figuring out how to sustain that survival strategy. Does anyone realistically expect people who are struggling to keep their version of civilization viable to be willing to expend the time/money/effort to transition back? Even if that is the case, do you honestly think a large majority of the survivors would be in favor of such a plan?

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Sys1 wrote:What will be quite funny is when big coal or Donald Trump will say we must throw fossil fuels dust in the atmosphere faster "to save the planet" (tm) from GW.

Putting dust or microspheres or sulphuric aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet is already being tested by scientists who claim they can "geoengineer" the planet to counteract global warming.

Sys1 wrote:What will be quite funny is when big coal or Donald Trump will say we must throw fossil fuels dust in the atmosphere faster "to save the planet" (tm) from GW.

Putting dust or microspheres or sulphuric aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet is already being tested by scientists who claim they can "geoengineer" the planet to counteract global warming.

Coming soon to a sky near you.....

BS. SO2 has to be injected above 30 km in the stratosphere in the tropics in order for the Brewer-Dobson circulation and Rossby wave mixing in the "surf zone" to spread it horizontally towards the poles. Based on the Pinatubo signal, around 10 million tons per year need to be injected. If the SO2 is introduced at lower altitudes it will be flushed too fast into the troposphere and removed by wet scavenging. No jet can fly at 30 km. Only specialized planes such as the U-2 can fly at 22 km but not higher. The rapidly attenuating air density messes up air-foil boundary layer behaviour.

All the talk about planes, towers and cannons to deliver the SO2 is nothing but vapid bunk. The use of giant dirigibles is more plausible. Supposedly some designs would be able to carry 500 tons of payload. Assuming one trip per day we need 10,000,000/(365*500) = 55 of them. But none of the proposed designs would be able to reach 30 km since they are rigid or semi-rigid. Only true balloons can expand with altitude to reach about 35 km:

dissident wrote:BS. SO2 has to be injected above 30 km in the stratosphere in the tropics in order for the Brewer-Dobson circulation and Rossby wave mixing in the "surf zone" to spread it horizontally towards the poles. Based on the Pinatubo signal, around 10 million tons per year need to be injected.

From what I know, Mt Pinatubo have lowered global temperatures by 0.5 *C for 2 years at the expenditure of something like 30 million tons of SO2.Lets say that we are fighting 5*C degree warming to reduce it to 3*C.So we need to go down 2*C.Assuming that in order to get 0.5 *C cooling 10 millions tons of SO2 per year is needed I suspect that for 1*C 20 millions tons would be needed, for 1.5*C it would be 40 millions tons per year and for 2*C it would be 80 millions tons per year as relation is not linear in this case.So theoretically we could cool down the Earth up to 3-3.5 *C if we delivered to stratosphere *entire global production of sulfuric acid* round o'clock for decades and centuries.I wonder what resulting acid rains would do to vegetation... and where the carbon from decomposing dead vegetations would go.

IMO entire concept of SO2 mediated cooling is plain stupid and unworkable.But in postscience era any stupidity might be attempted.

dissident wrote:BS. SO2 has to be injected above 30 km in the stratosphere in the tropics in order for the Brewer-Dobson circulation and Rossby wave mixing in the "surf zone" to spread it horizontally towards the poles. Based on the Pinatubo signal, around 10 million tons per year need to be injected.

From what I know, Mt Pinatubo have lowered global temperatures by 0.5 *C for 2 years at the expenditure of something like 30 million tons of SO2.Lets say that we are fighting 5*C degree warming to reduce it to 3*C.So we need to go down 2*C.Assuming that in order to get 0.5 *C cooling 10 millions tons of SO2 per year is needed I suspect that for 1*C 20 millions tons would be needed, for 1.5*C it would be 40 millions tons per year and for 2*C it would be 80 millions tons per year as relation is not linear in this case.So theoretically we could cool down the Earth up to 3-3.5 *C if we delivered to stratosphere *entire global production of sulfuric acid* round o'clock for decades and centuries.I wonder what resulting acid rains would do to vegetation... and where the carbon from decomposing dead vegetations would go.

IMO entire concept of SO2 mediated cooling is plain stupid and unworkable.But in postscience era any stupidity might be attempted.

Thanks for the update. The 10 million figure came from one of the geoengineering papers I read about 12 years ago. The authors assumed less warming. So, as you note, the amount injected has to go up.

I always found the notion of using massive cannons to inject the SO2 via shells to be inane. The amount of powder gases released in the lower troposphere would be enormous. Leading to both massive health and environmental damage and also aerosol loading that would act to amplify the warming.

Then we have the little detail that the SO2 injected would destroy the ozone layer. This would contribute to tropospheric warming since the UV would reach deeper and form ozone at lower altitudes. In the troposphere, ozone is a greenhouse gas. And as you note, eventually the sulfate loaded into the stratosphere would be transported into the troposphere, where it would directly contribute to global acid rain. It would also increase the sulfate in the upper troposphere and tropopause layer leading to more diffuse cloud formation, which acts to trap IR in the troposphere while permitting visible solar radiation to pass to the surface.

It is indeed the post-science and post-thinking era. The era of knee-jerk group-think and lemming herding.

@Dissident,Here is a very good, detailed study of Mt Pinatubo erruption:https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com ... 03GC000654Access is free.It seems that about 20 millions of tons SO2 was produced as an average of few studies.30 millions I have mentioned was an upper limit of one of studies discussed in this review.Though it does not change anything at all in overall picture - idea is entirely unworkable and if attempted will cause immense damage to ecosystem while failing to achieve its objections.But if growing number of prominent scientists and tech enterpreneurs/geeks *believe* in Multiverse or in ideas that all what we are is computer simulation, then our future is rather bleak.Science is abandonig requirements of rigorous experimental evidence, or sometimes like in case of Multiverse or string theories it is abandoning requirements of *any* evidence at all, however slight.Currently it is often driven by fashion, makeshift dogma and referrals to "authority" and it becomes a sort of religion.So anything, however absurd, can be proposed.Recently I have red about serious ideas of pumping of 5-20 billions of tons of oceanic water per year up into stratosphere and further nonsense about removing CO2 from atmosphere by giant zeolite based gas separators or/and artificial leaf technology.I won't even go to details about energy reqirements, availabilty of materials and technological challenges related to such projects. Trivial back on the envelope calculations are showing how hopelessly stupid such ideas are in real world, eg pumping of single billion of tons of oceanic water 15 km up would require burning 100 Mt of coal, assuming 100% efficiency etc. I also wonder what such an immense amounts of bromides and iodides present in sea water which are prone to photolysis by UV and ionizing radiation present in stratosphere would do to ozone layer.I really don't know what is better, cry or laugh, when you read about such "projects".I only hope that it is just taxpayer ripoff scam and deep down our scientists do know that it is nonsense.Because if they don't then anything and everything is lost.

Sys1 wrote:What will be quite funny is when big coal or Donald Trump will say we must throw fossil fuels dust in the atmosphere faster "to save the planet" (tm) from GW.

Putting dust or microspheres or sulphuric aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet is already being tested by scientists who claim they can "geoengineer" the planet to counteract global warming.

Coming soon to a sky near you.....

BS. SO2 has to be injected above 30 km in the stratosphere in the tropics in order for the Brewer-Dobson circulation and Rossby wave mixing in the "surf zone" to spread it horizontally towards the poles. Based on the Pinatubo signal, around 10 million tons per year need to be injected. If the SO2 is introduced at lower altitudes it will be flushed too fast into the troposphere and removed by wet scavenging. No jet can fly at 30 km. Only specialized planes such as the U-2 can fly at 22 km but not higher. The rapidly attenuating air density messes up air-foil boundary layer behaviour.

All the talk about planes, towers and cannons to deliver the SO2 is nothing but vapid bunk. The use of giant dirigibles is more plausible. Supposedly some designs would be able to carry 500 tons of payload. Assuming one trip per day we need 10,000,000/(365*500) = 55 of them. But none of the proposed designs would be able to reach 30 km since they are rigid or semi-rigid. Only true balloons can expand with altitude to reach about 35 km:

Given the manifest failure of the UNFCC, the Kyoto Accords and the Paris Accords to stop the ever increasing amounts of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, governments are now looking at ways to geoengineer the climate with new interest. Geoengineering now seems to be the only way to stop global warming and save the planet.

Plantagenet wrote:Given the manifest failure of the UNFCC, the Kyoto Accords and the Paris Accords to stop the ever increasing amounts of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, governments are now looking at ways to geoengineer the climate with new interest. Geoengineering now seems to be the only way to stop global warming and save the planet.

As a rule of thumb letting incompetent humans decide what artificial strategies to attempt in their clumsy way gives me the willies. I have long advocated biochar for example as a soil amendment, but that is as much because it has been demonstrated to maintain fertility in tropical soils and alleviates the need for "slash and burn" agriculture in the tropics. I also think done properly and with caution ocean fertilization could be a large benefit through restoring the food chain from the bottom up for many threatened species. However both strategies need to be applied with common sense and not as a "the government said yes so all our eggs are going in this basket"! The third strategy I am in favor of is reforestation, especially in the arctic where the climate zones are already moving north. This is just a common sense idea, but it seems as if the authors want a one size fits all solution which is the typical government response.

Of the other strategies, biofuel growing with CCS is just plain stupid IMO. Any excess biofuels should be converted to char for soil amendment, not consumed as some halfhearted replacement for fossil fuels. CCS is incredible expensive and unlikely to change much in that aspect and biofuels have nowhere near the energy density of fossil fuels which is why humanity switched away from them in the first place. However if you take a "biofuel" solid and convert it into biochar almost 50% of the carbon in the mass is converted into char. Grinding and distributing powdered char into soils takes a little energy, but nowhere near what CCS takes, and the technology is well known and simple.

There is an additional strategy that was suggested decades ago I don't see anywhere on this list either. Gather crop residues and compress them into dense bundles of biomass, then drop them in places where delta formation is going on from every large river on the planet. The material sinks to the sea bottom and is soon buried in silt where it will be a stable undisturbed mass for thousands of years if not permanently. This has a leg up on the biochar system as it captures nearly all of the carbon in the plant residues. If you don't think baling the biomass is sufficient you hydraulically compress it into aluminum drums and seal them so that it won't be accessible to wildlife.

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Somewhere a long while ago I read that some of the geoengineering strategies are within the means of super rich individuals. The threat being that some one of them could take action in their own with bad results. Worse, that 2 or more entities could take uncoordinated action really screwing the pooch.

I’ve long come to the conclusion that we will end up geoengineering, it’s inevitable. It’s also likely we will screw it up big time.